As e-commerce stores grow, the process of filling orders becomes increasingly tedious without software to help. Some shopping carts have some of the features needed to fill orders, such as the ability to print packing slips, track order history as well as packages, and so forth. But bringing an order management package online is often one of the best things a business owner can do to streamline this process.
At its heart, order management software allows a company to review, alter, and track the status of orders received via the website. It usually allows you to print forms, enter manual orders, and purchase and print shipping labels. In a nutshell, order management software takes over where the website leaves off, and ends when your carrier picks up a package for delivery.
Order management software usually offers tools to accomplish a variety of post-sale tasks, including:
- Downloading of order data from the website
- Reviewing the order contents, address, and payment details
- Assigning a status to the order (pending, shipped, backordered, cancelled) and even individual items
- Printing order forms, such as packing slips or invoices
- Accumulating certain order data into reports for business intelligence
- Exporting data to financial software
- Generating shipping labels, whether simple address-only labels, or prepaid shipping labels from UPS, FedEx, and others
- Transmitting status and tracking information to the customer
- Altering an order, such as editing the address, or adding or removing products
Options in order management software are varied, and offer different levels of functionality and price. Some of the more common ones are Shipworks by Interapptive, Order Manager by Stone Edge, and Mail Order Manager by Dydacomp.
Another nice feature of order management systems like Order Manager and ShipWorks is when you are ready to oursource your order fulfillment to a service provider like us, the same system can export your order data as XML or CSV files to the fulfillment company’s online system and then download the resulting tracking number and ship cost data back to your order management database.
This same data export feature is available in many turnkey web store systems like YahooStores and MIVA or even buy-me button systems like PayPal. This means you as an online merchant can upload your shipping data once or twice a day and then return to working on your sales and marketing projects–or maybe even just enjoy life for awhile!
John Lindberg – President
EFULFILLMENT SERVICE INC
http://www.efulfillmentservice.com
Awesome point, John. Even for customers who don’t ship products themselves, these packages can help tremendously with communications, order history and status, etc.
You make a great point. It is a great way to help you keep track of everything.
Employing an order management system is definitely an effective tool especially for those who wish to run various business functions smoothly. It may seem complex at first but the processes will definitely be smoothed out by the system. Many companies have been able to increase their efficiency by applying this system.